I IMAGINE ALL OF THIS WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES

As the leadership of Hamas has explained publicly, they expected, at the very least, for Iran and her proxies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan to go all-in in response to their October massacres. Hamas expected as much but were also actively calling on Hezbollah (that surrogate of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the folks training and arming Hamas) as well as the rest of the world’s extremist Shiite and Sunni forces, and anyone sympathetic to the anti-Zionist cause (from Beirut to Berkeley), of course, to join in the great battle they’d initiated. And they’ve been unrelenting in their calls.

Though attacks have come at Israel from all sides, no full-on invasion has been attempted nor has any sustained bombardment materialized. The Iron Dome has made short work of irregular rocket attacks from south Lebanon while smaller ground incursions there have been quickly repelled by an awakened IDF, who has placed half their army in the area to deter an invasion. Still, the absence of a much larger and better-coordinated push, especially after all these months, has resulted in much ill-concealed consternation from Hamas’ top brass, who are now even starting to publicly call out their so-called supporters. That’s a bad sign.

To serve their purpose, Hezbollah simply must engage the Zionist foe they were formed, programmed, armed and recently built-up to combat. And, just as the Hamas leadership has suggested, if not now, when? However ineffectual to this point, Hezbollah has been gladly violating UN Security Council resolution 1701 for some time. The resolution, established in 2006 and agreed to by all parties, called for an arms embargo on Lebanon and the observation of a demilitarized zone along its southern border. The Iranian surrogate has been continually accepting materiel shipments, many of which have been intercepted by Israel, but plenty have been getting through. Something on the order of 100,000-200,000 rockets and anti-tank missiles are said to be in Hezbollah hands, which would be enough to set fire to half the cities and towns in northern Israel, even with a functioning and well-supplied Iron Dome. With those assets, Hezbollah has also crossed the Litani river and even the Blue Line, launching dumb rockets, precise anti-tank missiles, along with cadres of Palestinian commandos into northern Israel, all of which has resulted in the displacement of almost 200,000 civilians in the area. And the situation isn’t getting better.

At the January 2024 meeting of the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Qatar, for example, Ismaeel Haniyeh, absentee leader of Hamas, pleaded with his global audience, asking “Who wishes to invest in building the jihadist generation to liberate Jerusalem and to unite the blood of the Ummah with the blood of the people of Gaza, Jerusalem, and Palestine on the land of Palestine for its liberation and the liberation of Jerusalem?” He asked his supporters around the globe to engage in “financial jihad” and “jihad of the teeth”. More recently Haniyeh called for “the Axis of Resistance” to step up attacks during Ramadan. He does so at the same time, surveys show Palestinian support for Hamas tripled after October and that the vast majority deny Hamas and friends committed any atrocities against Israeli civilians. This, even as we have videos of Palestinian cities thronged with folks in the streets and leaning from their apartment windows, looking very much like V-E Day celebrations, cheering and whistling and hooting and hollering with delight as Gazans paraded their captives and the corpses of Israeli civilians through town.

So, what have we seen since then? We’ve seen major operations and attacks by these groups and their compatriots recently thwarted in Israel, Turkey, Russia, Germany, Netherlands, the US, and Brazil. We also saw the doubling down of Houthi rocket and anti-ship cruise missile attacks in the Red Sea (hitting assets of their allies or neutral parties as much as any conceivable Western targets) and another 170 separate attacks, mostly by Hezbollah and other Iran-backed militias, on US assets in Syria, Iraq, and Jordan. At the same time, the streets of Frankfurt, Dublin, Dearborn, and Edmonton alike continue to host weekly kaffiyeh-clad orgies with celebrants writhing to all their greatest hits: “From the river to the sea”, “Intifada revolution”, “Germany/Ireland/America/Canada/Israel is a terrorist state.” Gladly carrying out Haniyeh’s commands, these freedom fighters and social justice swingers collect donations while encouraging boycotts (of various companies for reasons and to what end they can never quite articulate — especially in light of their main targets having actually seen record revenues.) We’ve also seen folks doing the work of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad behind the scenes, shaping the culture quietly from inside Western institutions. For instance, a taxpayer-funded group in the UK, Collections Trust, has offered new guidance for best practices in inclusivity, including recommendations to label Israel as a “settler colonial” power and, thus, jihadist militants as “anti-colonial freedom fighters” while also warning of the threats posed by the “pro-Israel Western media.” Talk about having lost the plot: these prescriptions are so devoid of common sense and observational reliability that they can only have been fabricated by someone with a graduate degree.

As you may suspect or have come across yourself, the folks who would participate in all this have taken to sustaining their outrage and campaigns to reshape the world to Iran's vision by sharing videos of events that did not occur or that took place in other conflicts at other times or in other places. A list of such offerings would be far too long to spell out here, but just recently I’ve seen Yemeni children killed by Houthis years ago labelled as Gazans children killed by Israelis today. Elsewhere an “innocent child hunted down and shot in the back by the IDF” is, if you don’t exclude the opening minute of the video, seen walking up to a soldier, pulling out a knife, and hacking at the neck of the man before attempting to flee the scene and being shot, yes, in the back… and on and on, more “evidence of Israeli war crimes” of this sort arrives daily and is shared widely (by doctors and lawyers and history professors and journalists.)

And as this happens, world opinion (or rather what’s coming across on the nightly news on major networks in twelve Western nations) appears to have crystalized around some sort of vague feeling that it would have been nice if Israel could have taken out the genocidal maniacs (throughout the region and around the globe who’ve devoted their own lifetimes and that of their children to wiping clean and then sterilizing the Arab and Muslim homelands of the Jewish/Zionist stain — as dictated by their textbooks and teachers in UN-funded and operated elementary schools) in three weeks or less and with no disruption to civilian life. Talk show hosts and bloggers-turned-podcasters tell us their untenable version of world history and a eugenicist-era race concept should be all that guides our feelings about anything related to this conflict. Superheroes and true-colour grifters (who reject what folks on the ground tell us they want and who demonstrate an inability to form a coherent theory of mind for anyone anywhere) insist they're uniquely well-situated to inform and sway public opinion and foreign policy. While doing so they all argue this whole mess, even the attack on Israeli civilians, is the fault of Netanyahu and, most obviously, Western imperialism. This is proclaimed to be the sophisticated, late night-approved and protester-endorsed understanding that may be uttered aloud in public. Of course, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar surveys this situation and responds, as rockets continue to be launched into Israel (only now from the rubble of what was Gaza), with all the messianic zeal of someone who feels he's clearly won the war.

And all of this has now been thrust up against recent warnings from the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that Iran has not merely stopped being transparent about its nuclear program: Iranian officials have said they now have everything they need to make a nuclear device. They tell us as much while officials there have been talking loosely about using nuclear weapons and more recent reports have shown them building a heavily fortified, bunker buster-immune facility next to their nuclear enrichment operation.

I imagine all of this will have consequences in the world. I imagine a war with Hezbollah (aka Iran) will be unavoidable, with or without the already non-existent material or moral support of countries like Canada. (Canada, who is busy unlearning the lessons of "None is too many.") And I imagine the formal opening salvos will take place imminently, during or after they finish their job in Rafah (which some suggest will take place in another month or two.) I imagine Hezbollah will dictate that the main fighting will occur in Lebanon, a nation already on the brink of collapse, and that Iran's main ports, north and south, will soon be taken out to cripple their oil exports and as a response to months of Houthi attacks... though all of that seems less like speculation and close to being obvious at this point. But we will see.